The first home we bought as a couple was owned by a man who loved extension cords inside and out. And the ones he strung outside were your standard indoor cords. We removed them all the first day.
I think I may have done a thread on our current house - I know I’ve shared photos and stories in the past. But I’ll do a quick and dirty summary of some of the high points.
The kitchen walls were covered in contact paper… orange and yellow mushrooms! They set off the green counter and flooring very nicely. When we removed the crappy medicine cabinet in the hall bathroom, we found 2 more layers of contact paper - both pretty hideous. The vanity and another cabinet in that bathroom were trimmed in the same wallpaper border that ran around the ceiling. And both bathrooms had faux marble sinks that were pretty much destroyed by harsh cleaners. Blue veined mirrored tiles - 35 of them - glued to the dining room wall. Forty-five gold-veined mirrored tiles glued to the bedroom wall served as a headboard of sorts.
Then there were the paranoia features. All windows had locking latches - as in key-locked - plus they had screws driven thru the windows as an extra lock. All 3 gates to the back yard had heavy chains and locks. The front and back storm doors had deadbolts into the frames. The front door has barrel bolts top and bottom, plus a deadbolt lock, plus the usual door lock. The garage man door had 2 locks, as did the door between the garage and the house. The door to the basement had a barrel bolt. Oddly enough, each of the 2 sliding glass doors just had single wooden posts to wedge in the tracks. There was also a barrel bolt on the bedroom door and an alarm switch in the master that was connected to one of the 3 garden sheds and to a fire sensor in the garage.
And not the house specifically, but most of the things they left behind had dates on them - like the snow shovels, the garbage cans, a push broom, a radio, the washing machine. There’s also still a list written on the wall inside the main garage door with dates and apparent snowfall measurements. Oh, and the fridge in the garage had beer in it - from 1997. We bought the house in 2004…
Needless to say, we’ve fixed a LOT in the last 9 years.
Is it possible they just didn’t see those ones? Are they in any way hidden from view when doing the rest of them? When I pictured this project I imagined a few stumps (say four or six or eight) so skipping a few more would have saved some money if they were in good shape and it’s not like the house would settle of those ones went bad, but I can’t think of any reason to skip 4 after doing over a hundred.
I do a lot of electrical projects around my house and at work and I do that, it took about 10 seconds to realize that it makes a lot more sense to write the into not on the plate but somewhere inside the box.
Not dangerous like some mentioned, but perplexing and a bit eeeewwww. The house we bought 9 years ago, and are currently selling, has a workshop/shed across the bottom of the garden. Its bottom wall is right up against the chainlink fence which forms the bottom boundary. We bought from a retired couple and he spent a lot of time in there on various projects. We can only assume a LOT of time… In the back wall of the shed, at about crotch height, there is a funnel, made of an upturned plastic container and a spout, which disappears through the wall. There’s a flap of carpet making a lid. MAYBE he used it to dispose of oil or something? Maybe? (Although I’m not happy about that option either).
We had the common experience of tearing up crappy carpet and behold! a hardwood floor! Except this hardwood was only so-so quality. No matter, we tore up a bit of that and found 101 year old Douglas Fir flooring that 's lovely. Floorception!
The only problem was that this many layers of flooring adds a lot of thickness. No worries, the geniuses who owned our house before solved this dilemma by shaving the bottoms off of all the doors.(Steel front door included !?!) I could never figure out why our house had weird Hobbit sized doors until we started peeling away layers. Now the doors have 3" gaps on the bottoms, and will be replaced.
They also closed off an old heat register by removing the grille, taking a cardboard beer case and wrapping it in black electrician’s tape, and stuffing the taped up box into the hole. Re-attach the grille and you’re good to go!
We also discovered a spaghetti mess of knob & tube wires when we took the plaster off the wall. My husband wasn’t worried, after all it had been disconnected years ago, right? Just to show me he held up the voltage detector thingy and BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!, oh look, guess it’s still hot. We immediately called an actual electrician who spent five hours tearing out about 40 POUNDS of knob & tube wiring complete with open air splices nestled into our attic insulation. Sweet Jebus, I have no idea why our house was not merely a pile of ashes at this point.
So many other weirdo things, and we’ve only started renos on the dining room and a 2nd bedroom. Will keep you posted when we start the kitchen in the spring!
When we redid our bedroom closet, I pulled out the old shelves and rod, and went to patch and paint before installing the new system. I discovered rows of nails along the walls that always ended at studs. Poor man’s stud finder, I guess.
The previous owner did a few odd things, but this is one of the odder things: he kept very detailed records of the maintenance on the furnace; dates of service, filter changes, etc. Very nice, except he took it with him when he moved out.
We painted ours over because they had already been painted over, and if we didn’t they’d be a weird color that doesn’t match. So the question isn’t why it was done multiple times, but why it was done once. The subsequent times are pretty inevitable.
My dad paints over outlets and switches. Personally, I say that even if you paint over them you aren’t going to ‘hide’ them and I think they look worse that way so you might as well make them accents in the room. Besides, they need to get touched up at least once a year or they look gross. Take the switch plates off, paint then replace the switch plates and the switches/outlets with the appropriate ones that look nice in the room. I tend to use brightly colored paints so I change mine over to white from almond.
Something else my last homeowner did and my father did is paint around light fixtures. I hate going to home depot, buying a new light fixture, taking the old one down only to find out the last person painted around the old one instead of taking it down. It takes less time to take it down the paint around it anyways. Taking all the plates and lights off the walls is the first thing you should do when you start painting* anyways. When I ran into that in my house I was lucky that the new fixture was bigger so it covered everything. At my parent’s house a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to find a 15 year old can of the same paint, thick as pudding and full of rust but I managed to salvage just enough to paint the unpainted spot and put up the new fixture.
*When I’m painting I usually take down the light and replace it with one of these. It’s small enough that you can just let it hang by the wires and now that we have CFLs you can put a pretty bright light it.
Nope. There was only one not replaced out of four holding up the stairs and as I said more than a hundred for the house as a whole, and the one not replaced would have to have been one of the easiest to access and most obvious in the whole house. And they replaced the others holding the stairs up which were only a few feet away.
Really I can only think that they miscalculated and were one stump short, then somehow never got around to coming back to do the final stump, or something.
it’s in a part of the country that tends to have relatively gloomy weather. This area has a decoration trend which is unshared by the rest: painting every room in bright colors. The style is known as “bringing the sun in” or, alternatively, “we don’t give a shit what decoration mags say”. The previous owners subscribed to this school of thought; so do I, but evidently people who do not would find it horrendous. The bathroom is the original 1958 green, the hallway is baby blue, the bedroom which used to be two shades of copper is now two shades of yellowish orange, the one which used to be bright orange is still bright orange and the living room (which used to be strawberry) is now strawberry in three walls and a whited-down strawberry on the other. The kitchen is the only room with beige floor tile and wall tiles in a green light enough to count as off-white.
the house is part of a development built by the same people who would inhabit it. It happens to be the oldest one. The walls are old-farm thick, able to whitstand mortar fire (which many local farms did in the two previous centuries); that’s both the outer walls and one of the hallway walls (hey, they wanted to make sure the house wouldn’t fall down). The plumbing is ok. The electrician… was the only guy who was crazy enough to start playing with copper wires despite never having seen one before; part of my renovation was changing the original waxed-cloth wires and bringing the whole thing up to code.
I’m the third owner. The second one is a carpenter by training and one of those guys who can’t stop still; he’d renovated the parquet (including engraving a lauburu in the entrance and the town’s coat of arms in the living room) and updated the windows to double-glass aluminum frames. Thing is, there is a ground-level storage room / kitchen / garage, and the electricity for that room comes from my living room. The cable for it runs very elegantly (cough cough) down the facade, as do those of my neighbors. And the hole in the wall used to be big enough for me to put both fists in Now, I do have small hands, but seriously? I smacked some plaster on it within days of buying the house, now it’s properly sealed. The electrician checked and bringing that particular cable up to code would have cost more than the rest, plus I would have needed my neighbors’ permission as it modifies the facade.
popcorn walls. Ah, popcorn walls, how I hate thee! And if I do end up getting Grandma’s flat, it’s got more popcorn than a movie theater’s concession stand - this has to count as masochism. Anyway. There was a piece of furniture in the entrance which evidently did not match anything else: cover-your-eyes polyester gleam, a small chest of drawers in front of a large mirror. When they showed me the place, the previous owners said “as you can imagine, this is original. Let us show you why.” They moved the chest, revealing that the mirror was built around it. Then they brought down the mirror, revealing archaeological layers. Their blue paint over at least three previous layers of paint over the popcorn over IIRC five layers of wallpaper, all of them set in place without moving the mirror.
when I renovated, the hallway’s popcorn got removed. Renewing the electrical setup needed making so many holes that it actually was less work to get rid of the rest of the popcorn than to try and rebuild it (yay!). There is a radiator set in a hole in the support wall. “Do we take the popcorn out there as well?” “Hell no, look at it!” The many layers of paint have been applied so that they stick the radiator to its supports, the regulator to the radiator, and at one of the ends, the radiator to the wall. Any attempts at removing that thing would need a new one put in place. I’ve got cast-iron radiators and they work beautifully; I try to purge the circuit once a year because you’re supposed to and every year I find out there is no need to. Do not fix that which is not broken, that bit of popcorn stayed in place.
Our house has an addition - living room on the first floor, master bedroom above. The original house was built by a carpenter and is well built. We have decided that the addition was built by cheap drunks who didn’t bother with measuring, leveling or squaring.
Starting at the bottom…
The joists under the living room floor run vertically the length of the room 2/3s of the way across, then they must have run out of long joists because there short joists that go horizontally across the last 1/3rd. They didn’t bother to make sure the vertical joists and the horizontal joists were level, so there is a ridge in the sub-flooring that runs the length of the room.
When we re-sided the house, we discovered that the sheathing on the addition was whatever piece of wood they could find. There were cabinet doors, farm stand signs (really! Black block letters that said Apple Products Sold Here) old pieces of knotty pine bead board, 1" wide slivers of scrap wood.
No headers over the door or windows.
They ran out of studs half way through building the back wall, so they used what ever short pieces of 2x4 they had and cobbled them together.
They also were fans a long nails. For some god-knows-what-reason they put a dropped ceiling above the stairs going to the second floor. They used 3" nails to nail the aluminum strips to the walls.
Oh, I forgot to tell some of the younger-brother-buggers-the-house details. They must have been working on a zero budget, because there were egregiously reused materials in every job. One door was completely rebuilt - an inch in width added with six-inch blocks, the door jambs repurposed by reversing them and filling all the grooves, the molding reused in two-foot lengths - it must have taken hours and hours to cut and fit the small pieces of wood used for all these things. The prehung door I replaced it all with cost $38 five or six years later, and was probably cheaper, measured in minimum-wage hours spent.
We ran into a lot of that - going to to pull off ugly molding to find it was a series of very short lengths carefully butted (or not so carefully), damaged trim that was elaborately fixed up to use the back side, and carpeting seamed together from five to six foot squares.
SWMBO’s folks used to live in the French Quarter in New Orleans. They had one of the classic Quarter houses, built back in the late 1700s. They were doing some interior renovations and when they took down one wall, they found an entire PBX unit inside it.
Apparently, whoever owned the house back in the Roaring 20s or thereabouts was using it as a bookie joint.
I think the all-time topper on this belongs to Veronical Hamel of Hill Street Blues. She was remodeling a house when the contractors found an extensive system of electronic cameras and microphones covering most of the interior, so well hidden in the construction that it had gone undetected for thirty years. The equipment dated to the early 1960s but was far more sophisticated than anything a consumer could have bought until some ten years later.
It really is a wonder more people aren’t killed by their houses and what they’ve done to them. I can just picture that basement - metal forest indeed!
It seems awfully foreign to me, too, to not care about putting plants in your yard, but I’ve come to the conclusion that some people just don’t care. I see so many yards with a lawn, a tree, and a shrub - nothing else at all going on there. Not a single flower bed or anything. Whenever I move into a house, I have new plants planted and new beds dug before we’re finished moving in, practically!
The previous owner of this house fancied himself a handyman, especially an electrician. Here and there, there are faux electrical receptacles. Some have no wiring, or worse, they’re wired with lamp cord. There’s a traditional fuse box and two circuit breakers, and the circuits make no sense at all, e.g. the light over the kitchen sink is on the same circuit as the ceiling fan in the 2nd bedroom, on the 2nd floor.
Oh, and the guy painted every single thing in the basement with dark metallic silver paint.
Our condo has weird wiring. There’s a poorly marked standard 8-breaker box in our unit. 2 for the HVAC, 2 marked “lighting”, 2 marked “appliance”, one marked “disposal”, and one marked “dishwasher”. At least one “appliance” does not cover just the kitchen; that one also covers the dining room and my little office area.
Whoever built the complex as apartments back in '64 or so is probably responsible for that. The whole place is wired weird, it’s like there are multiple power mains feeding the complex. Our unit alone can have power to the bedrooms but not the dining room/living room; the complex itself can have power to the north half but not the south.
We live in what was once a tenant farmer’s one bedroom house of cement block construction from the 50s that started out 20’x20’. Some guy bought the place in 1986 and gutted it, tearing down one wall, expanding it to 20’x40’ and making it a 2 bedroom [1 9’x9’, 1 9’x11’] with no closets, a U shaped kitchen that entirely fits within 10’x10’ with a 6’x6’ utility room and a 6’x10’ bathroom along one side making the ‘public living space’ of the entry area, kitchen area, area you can’t fit any sort of dining table in and livingroom of an L shape with a block of 20’x14’ for the non-livingroom, and a 14x16ish livingroom with 2 bedroom doors, the bathroom door and a hearth with wood stove on it. There is absolutely 1 way to set up the living room that is barely comfortable, they intended this little rounded square plot of counter top to be the eat at dining bar and counter which is also the only workspace in the house.
Interior design they did the dumbass ‘Country Goose’ garbage that looks absolutely craptastic unless it is done perfectly. The walls are vertical beadboard up to 4 feet from the floor, then above on the exterior house walls it changes to horizontal ‘varnished’ pine planks. On the 2 interior visible house walls where the vertical walls hit the height that the outer walls turn into the roof it get the cedar shingle treatment. The hearth was faced with the half inch thick fake bricks. The interior doors are all handmade to fit the nonstandard sized door frames. There are 2 8"x8" beams that cross the house and divide the nonbedroom part into thirds. He bought them greenish because they have both twisted along their length and on has a significant crack along the length. Thankfully they do not seem to be structural.
Electrically - the house is set upon a crawlspace that at the kitchen end of the house seems to be dug into the ground and is about 3 feet deep. Where the old part of the house starts, it changes to about 18 inches deep. There is a single light bulb in the deeper end which is permanently on, there is no switch in the house that turns it off, you have to turn the circuit breaker for the whole house off to get it to turn off. Both bedrooms are on one circuit breaker, the bathroom is on its own, which it shares with the light bulb in the utility room and the 220 well pump, and the furnace. The utility room has its own circuit. The kitchen/dining end of the house is on 1 circuit breaker for everything except the 220 for the stove and the 120 for the refrigerator. The livingroom and outside lights and outlets are on one breaker. Originally the barn was on its own breaker, but we got an electrician in and changed that breaker to a 220 for one o f those huge through the wall air conditioners that cools the living room/kitchen open area and added another 200 amps of service, 100 to the house and 100 to the barn so now we don’t have to decide which electrical outlets to use at any given time…
There have been times when I was serious that we should just add a can of gasoline, a lighter and walk away … I think over the past 23 years we have probably spent $50K fixing the crap the guy did. We say that he worships at the alter of Bob Vila … stuff looked cosmetically great but was either just barely code or dangerously out of code but cosmetically great. The inspector must have been in league with the seller because it passed a VA inspection!
My frat purchased an old three story house from the Church of Scientology. We had to remove the main floor washroom because there was shit not only covering the floor, but also covering the walls and the ceiling. The ceiling! It sort of puts different religious groups into perspective. The Roman Catholics had Michelangelo. The Anglicans had Wren. The Muslims had Abd al-Malik. The Scientologists had some fellow with a lot of really sticky shit and a long reach.
Lots of stuff over the years. An early one was wallpaper over wallpaper that had been painted, and the wallpaper was blistered.
Another room was wallpapered, and when we took it off, the underneath drywall had been put on backward - the cardboard side was facing out.
The furnace is upstairs, which isn’t something a ‘previous homeowner’ did, just stupid design.
The lamppost in the front yard got replaced by somebody *hacksawing *the old post near the bottom, then hacksawing a new lamppost near the bottom, and putting the new top on the old bottom with a black metal sleeve over the meetup point.
The water heater closet had asbestos paper stapled to the back of the closet door.
The dishwasher wasn’t mounted. Just sitting in the space for the dishwasher. When you pulled the top drawer out when it was loaded, the dishwasher would actually pitch forward a bit until the back top edge ‘caught’ on the underside of the counter.
Painted wood paneling. There’s more, but I’m blocking.
My wife and I call it having been “Jensonized”, for the same reasons.
Let’s see… f’ed up things they did:
[ul]
[li]they installed a garbage disposal without having the sense to actually punch out the plug that lets the dishwasher drain through it[/li][li]Painted everything with the cheapest, shiniest and most brushstroke showing white oil based enamel they could find.[/li][li]Installed a ceiling fan that was attached to the gang box (normal), but the gang box wasn’t actually affixed to anything. It was just straddling the hole for the fan wiring and mounting hardware.[/li][li]For some weird reason, they expanded 2 windows into sliding glass doors.[/li][li]In general, bought decent stuff and installed it in a comically incompetent way.[/li][li]Installed soffit panels and outdoor trim with bright nails and just painted over in hopes that they wouldn’t rust before the house was sold.[/li][li]Were masters of putty and paint on multiple things that looked fine when we bought the house, and then a year or two later, came apart to show absurdly rotted parts on the bay window and back door.[/li][li]Rather than at least pigtail the aluminum wiring with the purple wire nuts to copper romax, they just hooked up non CO/AL fixtures straight to the aluminum wiring.[/li][li]Didn’t label a damn thing on the breaker panel that they or their jacklegged electrician changed.[/li][/ul]
Shit as in… shit? Or as in “some shit”, ie “stuff”?
I could write a book on all the weird decisions previous owners made. My current house (we’re renting) has a glass divide in the middle of the room for no reason at all. The curtain rods were held up with ripped off bits of fabric tied to pipes.
But my parents’ house takes the cake. It was a listed building, centuries old… until the previous owners decided to “70s-ify” it. :eek:
They glued orange carpet to hardwood floors, ripped out other floors. Painted insane tableaus on old oak panelling. Ripped out features like the old pump. Replaced one of the staircases, and half (!) ripped out another. (The other half is still there, behind a secret panel!) Another staircase they left in, but remodelled so it now comes up into the walk-in cupboard in one of the bedrooms. Destroyed some of the old fireplaces.
Thankfully they only hid some beautiful 17th century Delftware tiles behind ugly little pine wood boards, that was nice find!
They also hid ornamental ceilings and beautiful old beams behind those weird plates, I don’t know what they’re called. They’re swirls of sort of…glued-on paper? I used to see all sorts of patterns in them.
They also numbered all the doors going off corridors and all the cupboard doors. Nine doors going off the central hall, 8 cupboard doors in my parents’ bedroom, 5 in the upstairs corridor etc. I still remember all those numbers.
Freaks.
It’s nearly 3 decades later and the house is only nearly recovering from the shock. Poor house
Now, I do have small hands, but seriously? I smacked some plaster on it within days of buying the house, now it’s properly sealed. The electrician checked and bringing that particular cable up to code would have cost more than the rest, plus I would have needed my neighbors’ permission as it modifies the facade.